Effective temperature of red-blood-cell membrane fluctuations

Eyal Ben-Isaac*, Yongkeun Park, Gabriel Popescu, Frank L.H. Brown, Nir S. Gov, Yair Shokef

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

117 Scopus citations

Abstract

Biologically driven nonequilibrium fluctuations are often characterized by their non-Gaussianity or by an "effective temperature", which is frequency dependent and higher than the ambient temperature. We address these two measures theoretically by examining a randomly kicked particle, with a variable number of kicking motors, and show how these two indicators of nonequilibrium behavior can contradict. Our results are compared with new experiments on shape fluctuations of red-blood cell membranes, and demonstrate how the physical nature of the motors in this system can be revealed using these global measures of nonequilibrium.

Original languageEnglish
Article number238103
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume106
Issue number23
DOIs
StatePublished - 8 Jun 2011
Externally publishedYes

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